Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite authors. (If you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, you really need to order it now). Her stories about possible future worlds are riveting and always contain enough plausibility for me to completely suspend my skepticism. Even though these future scenarios are often difficult and dire, her characters adapt and navigate them with pragmatic cleverness – and even humor. I recently finished this last book of the trilogy and find myself still thinking about the characters. I don’t want to let them go. Check it out!

I am a fan of this particular trilogy. Usually when there are a series of books that I enjoy, I have a bittersweet experience reading the last book in the series. This book was no different. I do not want to spoil the plot or story line, so I would like to simply contain my review to the dislikes:- Crake’s storyline = I’m still torn whether I’m satisfied with how Crake’s story plays out in the book. At times his story seems a little bit underdeveloped and shallow, but I also think it could be to make him seem like that on purpose (i.e. the reason he did what he did was more because he could and he wanted to and he is basically a sociopath)- Crakers = Maybe there is another book for them down the road, but I feel like the book developed their story up until the last two chapters and then conveniently wrapped everything up a little too quickly in order to finish up. -Read Reviews-

MaddAddam, like the whole of the Oryx and Crake trilogy, is a double dystopia, with two narrative presents: (1) an anarchic world of balkanized corporate dominance and environmental degradation prior to the near-extinction of humanity by an engineered superbug, and (2) a remnant community’s life in the ruins – and interaction with a community of genetically engineered human mutants designed to be more pacific– after the "waterless flood. "In MaddAddam, as in the trilogy as a whole, I found myself slipping in and out of suspended disbelief. My basic feeling was that the quasi-dystopia before the near-extinction of humanity is a powerfully imagined world, while the social life of the band of survivors of the "waterless flood" is cartoonish — though at the same time, the evocation of the language and inner life of the bioengineered mutant Crakians with whom the human remnant interacts is remarkable and haunting, an interior Eden. The weakest part is the back-story, taking up much of MaddAddam, of the remnant community’s protector and founder, Zeb. He’s a superhero, not a character, and his account of his dealings with supercriminals of the underworld reminds me a little of children’s author Madeline L’Engle’s attempts to imagine gang life in The Young Unicorns: not, shall we say, an insider’s account. His narrative voice is self-deprecating tough guy, as if Bono had been a drug lord. Those caveats aside, the earlier narrative of several characters’ trials in the pre-flood anarchic thugocracy is fully imagined, as is the nasty brutish society of the global failed state: its faux-civilized, luxurious corporate compounds, in which whistleblowers and would-be escapees are ruthlessly eliminated; its decayed urban infrastructure, where everyone is a squatter; its depraved online entertainments (real-time executions and child sex always on tap), its vicious streetwise child gangs, its multiple forms of sexual slavery; its cults formed in reaction to the chaos (the cult central to the tale is in fact lovingly if slightly mockingly evoked, its theology quite sophisticated). Entering this world has colored my understanding of our own, and our future. Three malign factors plausibly converge: global warming, which drowns the coastal cities and triggers mass extinctions, disrupting the human food supply; genetic engineering, which further corrupts the natural environment; and the overwhelming of state authority by corporate elites (in cahoots with corrupt latter-day "prosperity churches"), who develop private police forces that merge and morph into a leviathan answerable only to itself. At one point Crake, the young genius who later engineers both the destruction of most of humankind and a race of more pacific human variants, explains that once the central cables of our built environment are cut, our technological society could not be rebuilt (except, presumably, from its starting point, over millennia): Its not like the wheel, its too complex now. Suppose the instructions survived, suppose there were any people left with the knowledge to read them. Those people would be few and far between, and they wouldnt have the tools. Remember, no electricity. Then once those people died, that would be it. Theyd have no apprentices, theyd have no successors. ..All it the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and its game over forever (Oryx and Crake, p. 261). Crake, a teenager here, is talking about the destruction of the world he knows, the proto-dystopia of the trilogy’s narrative past. What’s truly scary about Atwood’s work is that it’s easy to imagine our world devolving into that brutal anarchy– and that there would be no way back from such a world, either. That, ultimately is I think Atwood’s conclusion, astonishingly enough: that the murderous Crake, who wipes out most of humanity while designing its successor, was right to do so. As the not-so-saintly Zeb sums up toward the end: All the real Gardeners believed the human race was overdue for a population crash. It would happen anyway, and maybe sooner was better (MaddAddam Location 5014). It’s hard to gainsay that, if you imagine bringing children into the world that the main characters grew up in. That makes the book a disturbing Jeremiad. Repent, for the end may be nigh.